Oma

The challenges associated with the provision of adequate and affordable housing around the world demand that architects respond with original solutions that challenge traditional building forms, typologies and methods of delivery.

In recognition of this demand, last month’s World Architecture Festival in Berlin chose housing as its thematic focus. The festival made headlines with Patrik Schumacher’s inflammatory keynote speech that called for cities to be turned over entirely to market forces, scrapping social housing and privatizing all public space. The controversy that followed belied the diversity of the discourse on housing at the Festival and the presentation of innovative architectural responses to housing challenges.

With the opening of the new Design Museum in London, the former Commonwealth Institute building designed by RMJM in 1962 has been given a new lease of life. With an exterior renovation by OMA and Allies & Morrison, and interiors by John Pawson, last month the building reopened after a fourteen-year closure—finally offering the public a chance to experience the swooping paraboloid roof from the inside. Read on to see photographs of the Design Museum's new home by Luc Boegly & Sergio Grazia.

OMA has released images of their masterplan for Feyenoord City, Rotterdam, after the plan was approved by city’s mayor and alderman. Developed for the Feyenoord football club, the project will consist of a redeveloped mixed-use district centered around a new 63,000 seat stadium for the team located along the Maas River.

Earlier this year, the Rem Koolhaas-led firm OMA launched a redesign of its website. If you haven't already popped over to see more than three decades worth of cutting-edge, provocative architecture projects, you'll have a good reason to now: downloadable excerpts from six of the office's highly acclaimed books and magazines.

http://www.archdaily.com/800142/17-excerpts-from-oma-publications-to-read-and-downloadAD Editorial Team

OMA, led by partner Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, have been chosen as the "Creative Mediators" for the 12th edition of Manifesta, which will be held in Palermo in 2018. The practice will assemble an interdisciplinary team to investigate the role of governance in the Italian city, and address how contemporary urban centers are affected by tourism, gentrification, migration and climate change. They will also work "with specialists from the fields of contemporary art, sociology, music, cinema and architecture" to develop a series of "interactive, interdisciplinary, performative and artistic interventions."

http://www.archdaily.com/800045/oma-announced-as-creative-mediators-for-manifesta-12-in-palermoAD Editorial Team

With the extensive list of acclaimed alumni of his firm, OMA, it is not a stretch to call Rem Koolhaas (born 17 November 1944) the godfather of contemporary architecture. Equal parts theorist and designer, over his 40-year career Koolhaas has revolutionized the way architects look at program and interaction of space, and today continues to design buildings that push the capabilities of architecture to new places.

This edition of Section D, Monocle 24's weekly review of design, architecture and craft, explores London's new Design Museum – a significant expansion for the institution at an entirely new location in West London. The interior spaces of the former Commonwealth Institute Building in Kensington, which is Grade II-listed, have been renovated by John Pawson. Alongside the museum’s Deputy Director, Alice Black, the Monocle team investigate the thinking behind the relaunch and how the spaces are designed to accommodate a shifting audience.

http://www.archdaily.com/799545/john-pawson-narrates-a-tour-through-londons-new-design-museumAD Editorial Team

Having found success in their winning competition entry for PEX Toulouse (currently under construction), the partnership has rejoined forces to take on PEX Bordeux. The architects designed their proposed addition with the goal of embedding architectural fragments to capture the essence of the original building.

We’ve now received additional proposals for the competition, including honorable mention-awarded entries from OMA, Staab Architekten, and Aires Mateus e Associados, and a finalist proposal from REX, that show alternative strategies for the site.

http://www.archdaily.com/799249/oma-aires-mateus-plus-staab-architekten-unveil-honorable-mention-proposals-for-new-neue-galerie-competitionAD Editorial Team

The official opening date for Caen's new public library, designed by Rotterdam-based practice OMA, has been slated for January 13, 2017. The Bibliothèque Alexis de Tocqueville will serve as the main library for the metropolitan region of Caen la Mer (in Normandy, France), with 12,000sqm of freely accessible multimedia space. Positioned on the tip of a peninsula that extends from the city to the English Channel, the site is part of a larger area of redevelopment. The ambition is for the library to become "a new civic center" for the city.

The Ensemble Immobilier Tour Maine-Montparnasse (EITMM) has selected 7 notable firms to continue to the second round in a competition for the renovation of Tour Montparnasse in the Montparnasse district of Paris, France.

Often cited as one of the architecture world’s most hated buildings, Tour Montparnasse has been criticized for its discordance with the Parisian urban landscape – just two years after its completion, new buildings over seven stories high in the city centre were banned, leaving the tower as an alien presence on the skyline.

With the launching of the competition, the EITMM hopes to transform Tour Montparnasse into a beloved landmark with a complete renovation of the facade, the building entry and all interior spaces. The budget for the project is estimated to reach over 300 million Euro ($330 million USD), and will be funded in entirety by the building owners.

OMA has released new images of their design for Axel Springer’s business and digital division, in Berlin, Germany. One of the largest digital publishing houses in Europe, Axel Springer officially launched the project to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the company’s publishing building.

OMA has unveiled its first residential tower for New York. Located at 121 East 22nd Street, the building sits at the intersection of two neighborhoods, with the busy Madison Square area to the North-West and the relative tranquility of Gramercy Park to the South. The building's facade reflects this duality, with a striking "prismatic corner" of glass contrasting the rest of the building's more conventional window layout. The corner element is designed to frame views, in some places directing users' attention up towards the sky and in others along the busy streets below.

“Belonging,” the curatorial quintet of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale, After Belonging, argue, “is no longer something bound to one’s own space of residence, or to the territory of a nation.” For this group of Spanish-born architects, academics and theorists—Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Ignacio Galán, Carlos Minguez Carrasco, Alejandra Navarrese Llopis and Marina Otero Verzier—the very notion of our belongings and what it means to belong is becoming increasingly unstable.

After Belonging is the sixth incarnation of the Triennale and the first one in which a single curatorial thread has woven all of the festival’s activities together, including the international conference. The goal of the two primary exhibitions—On Residence and In Residence, including a series of Intervention Strategies—is to develop platforms with the aim of “rehearsing research strategies,” providing new ways for architects to engage with “contemporary changing realities."

http://www.archdaily.com/795067/atelier-bow-wow-oma-amale-andraos-live-from-the-2016-oslo-architecture-triennale-after-belongingAD Editorial Team

In the canon of great Dutch architects sit a number of renowned practitioners, from Berlage to Van Berkel. Based on influence alone, Rem Koolhaas—the grandson of architect Dirk Roosenburg and son of author and thinker Anton Koolhaas—stands above all others and has, over the course of a career spanning four decades, sought to redefine the role of the architect from a regional autarch to a globally-active shaper of worlds – be they real or imagined. A new film conceived and produced by Tomas Koolhaas, the LA-based son of its eponymous protagonist, attempts to biographically represent the work of OMA by “expos[ing] the human experience of [its] architecture through dynamic film.” No tall order.

Artist Taryn Simon in collaboration with OMA/Shohei Shigematsu has designed An Occupation of Loss, a major new performance work choreographed around an OMA-designed monumental sculptural setting consisting of 11 concrete wells. Located at Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, and co-commissioned by the Armory and Artangel, London, the performance piece focuses on “the anatomy of grief and the intricate systems that we devise to contend with the irrationality of the universe.”

Our editors look at hundreds of websites per week. What do they admire and appreciate the most? Organization and simplicity. Sites that are not only clean, but fast. We actively search for projects to include on our platform, so it’s crucial that when we visit a website we not only know where to look, but how to access information. Filters and facets are our best friends. Typological differentiation is important, but perhaps not as important as distinguishing between built and un-built projects (“Is that a render?” is a question that comes up at least once a day).

http://www.archdaily.com/795078/these-are-the-best-designed-most-useful-architecture-firm-websitesAD Editorial Team